Using Visibility to Drive Performance

Clear visibility will drive the changes that matter. What if you could use visibility systems to positively impact your profitability? 

If you’re the kind of leader who has every employee already aware of exactly what high performance looks like, with complete visibility on how every employee is doing on the critical things that matter, stay tuned because I’ll share with you another higher level of performance enhancement.  

If instead you don’t know how every employee is performing every week, and if the ones who look busiest aren’t the ones that drive profit, you’ll enjoy knowing that you can take a lot of risks out of the organization. Low performers cause high performers to lead, even if you can’t see who was struggling to perform.  

And if you already have one or two visibility systems in place, you’ll find out how having interconnected systems creates the magic that can sustainably transform your performance.  

There are, however, a few challenges to putting accountability visibility into your organization. 

Unlike most traditional systems that measure the wrong things, you need to understand that the right leading and lagging indicators make it happen. Let’s face it since approximately 87% of your customers have a negative impact on your profits, who cares how many new customers you get this month? It’s the wrong metric.  

In contrast to most attempts to bring visibility metrics to your organization, where they overcomplicate and don’t drive performance, you need to understand that information is not communication. You don’t need metrics; you ultimately need performance breakthroughs driven by the right metrics. And when you bring visibility to low performance, you could lose many team members who if given the proper education and tools could instead be rockstars. So, getting visibility ahead of the proper education, progress, and results can be a corporate culture disaster. 

If you have one or more of these three challenges, consider yourself normal.  

There are three things that you can do to create an accountability system that optimizes results and drives sustainable performance improvement, as opposed to mass exodus, guilt and shame:  

Step one – Unlike so many performance dashboards, you must realize there is a pace and progression of ever-increasing improvement tied to what matters that must be followed. Cultures are vulnerable.  

Almost every organization has a few employees who come from an organization that did accountability but did it all wrong. And when you bring the expectation to hit metrics ahead of the clear path of winning, panic sets in. They freak out because they don’t know that what you’re doing is entirely different, empowering instead of deflating, but until they know that people start looking for the door.  

Step two – Roll out an interwoven system of visibility in the appropriate progression.  

Ever advancing daily huddles, weekly radio reports, quarterly celebrations, and other optimized systems need to be blended in the right order. Each of these serves a different purpose and must have an advancing level of what is reported on as people learn more. Then progress is made with their effectiveness and execution.  

If you get things out of order, as most companies do, they create a bigger mess.  

Step three – Understand that traditional stack ranking has proven to lower performance in all industries. Guilt, shame, and fear are not the right emotions to build a performance. That said being able to celebrate breakthroughs, top-performing individuals and teams, and positive reinforcement is imperative to performance breakthroughs. So, here’s how to start:  

One – Do not start with the performance dashboard or you can blow this whole thing into a mess of epic proportions.  

Two – Instead, create a grouping of interconnected accountability systems, make results visible, and make sure that you sequence the advancement of expectations tied to ever advanced, blended outcome-based learning.  

Three – Create a mechanism that celebrates top individuals and teams and breakthroughs from others, and still has accountability for those under the performance line without humiliating or embarrassing them.  

In our next video, I will show you how to create a raise the bar performance improvement system. It’s the same one that systematically skyrocketed the performance of hundreds of our clients.  

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